Spencer Alley: The Ruin

Friday, June 8, 2018

The Ruin

Heneage Finch
Part of a Classical Ruined Building under Trees
before 1812
gouache, watercolor
Tate Gallery

Anonymous British artist
Ruined Tower - Leaning Tower, Caerphilly
ca. 1800-1900
drawing
Tate Gallery

Charles John Holmes
Red Ruin, Lucerne
1907
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

"In the ruin, history has merged sensuously with the setting. And so configured, history finds expression not as a process of eternal life, but rather as one of unstoppable decline. Allegory thereby proclaims itself beyond beauty. Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things. Thus the Baroque cult of the ruin. . . . What lies shattered amid the rubble, the highly significant fragment, the scrap: this is the noblest material of Baroque creation. . . . In decay, solely and alone in decay, historical occurrence shrivels up and disappears into the setting. The quintessence of those decaying things is the extreme opposite of the ideas of a transfigured nature as conceived by the early Renaissance. Burdach has shown that the latter idea of nature is "in no way related to ours." "For a long time it remained dependent on the linguistic usage and thought of the Middle Ages, even if the valorization of the term 'nature' and the idea of nature visibly improve. The theory of art of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, in any case, understands the imitation of nature as the imitation of a nature formed by God." This nature, though, which bears the imprint of the course of history, is fallen nature. The Baroque preference for apotheosis runs counter to that period's characteristic mode of observing things. With the authority of their allegorical significance, things bear the seal of the all-too-earthly."

– Walter Benjamin, from The Ruin, excerpted from Origin of the German Trauerspiel (1928), translated by Michael W. Jennings (2008)